by Arturo Silva
–A bar for you and I, Roberta, a bar that’s ours. Three tatami, five guests.
–That’s what the foreigners love, exotic Tokyo, in the middle of the highrises and electronic gizmos, these six-tatami wooden bars in a three-block area and it takes you twenty minutes to refind the place you got drunk in last month.
–But that’s as it should be.
–And as it should not: Golden Gai will go, the skyscraper kids will wrap it up like dog shit on the street and deposit it on Dream Island.
–Right, and there’ll be a little ersatz shrine dedicated to dedicated drinkers.
–One for my you-know-who – or is it whom? – and one for the road, then.
–Really, what a walk to Roberta’s nine tatami!, a whole world.
–Is Shinjuku a desirable address?
–For who? I’d feel in the middle of – what’s the difference between a hurricane and a tornado? Which one has an eye? Which an asshole?
–People get it wrong; there is no Shinjuku, unless you count it a city unto itself. It so folds in and back upon itself that it fades away. Borderless, decentered – Piss Alley doesn’t up one’s image – you’re lost and found here.
–Desirable then if that’s what you need today. And today, I do not.
–What would Roberta say, what do you think, eh? A few months here, and then the move to shitamachi, that was wise, what she needed, she’s not a Shinjuku woman.
–Is there such a song?
–One for the road, and that mellowed walk now across Shinjuku –
–From neon to dark to neon again –
–Sex shows to ice cream parlors to mediocre sushi –
–A group of drunk salarymen to kids on a spree. “Oh, I love scrapes!”
–To girls with permanent fits of the giggles –
–Hey, there goes Araki into Dug!
–A faux Mexican restaurant with the most glamorous toilet in the city, all silver and mirrors and hot-house flowers, and terrible food, Arturo’s mother generously gave it a C-.
–Here we go then, around a corner, past the love hotels, the acupuncturist’s office, the Vietnamese restaurant –
–The Thai whores –
–The Russian whores, another corner, the condom vending machine, and –
***
Roberta’s round midnight. Paper lantern, late Debussy, and her copying Kenko. What taste: she sees no conflict between Lady Murasaki and Sei Shonagon.
***
rivers and hills
slopes, canals
Cupid and Psyche
in conversation
***
Driving in from Narita yesterday, Kaoru remembers, I got stuck in one of the older sections of the city, and I saw one of those trucks that clean out the toilets of houses without flushing. The men wore spotless uniforms. Where do they haul it all? To Tokyo’s own garbage dump, “Dream Island.” Wasn’t there a movie about it a few years back? Does it all just stay garbage? Do they transform it into something? Something useful? Is it used for landfill? Is it sifted through? Or is it just piled higher and higher? Was it a Sci-Fi movie? In a thousand years explorers from the Planet Zonar come to the thousand-story high Dream Island, Tokyo’s twenty-fourth ward, and there they read the history of the city, what we ate, who we made love to, the crimes we committed, the money we wasted, the junk we consumed and shat. The city we destroyed by ignoring. What is to become of us? Will we challenge Fuji with our trash? Hmm, my cigarette ash sometimes a miniature Fuji. I’ll have to give this more thought.
***
R’n’L!!!!!!
Good old Langenscheidt. No, I don’t mean the dictionaries. I mean the yellow crocodile balloon in my genkan, the house guardian. Marianne left it to me the last time she was over.
Gotta get some decent espadrilles. The cheap ones wear out so fast. Maybe this summer I can find some in Europe.
Things Fall Apart Dept. In one week I had the Panasonic man over to clean my fax machine … then the Yamaha guy came over to fix two of the stereo components … then somebody had to come over to fix the hot water button. High-tech life, my ass.
The mind roils (what a great word) in Tokyo. Everything happening at once – as we know it all does anyway – but here we’re assured of it, we experience it. You do understand me, don’t you? (God, what if you don’t?!)
Made a mean pesto. Better come over and get some.
What’s your favorite Elvis picture? Mine – well, one of ’em, one of many, of course – is that great photo of him and some girl kissing, their tongues stuck out, just touching. I wish I had gotten the poster of that when it was used as an ad for something a couple of years back. Was it a JR ad for the train system? Or was it for a magazine? Also wish I’d picked up that book – German, I think – of just photos of Him kissing a billion different women.
I missed that great typhoon in 1993 – when the trains had to stop and even the subways were flooded; I remember driving up to Hakushu with Akashi-san from Daitocho, and his potter friend, he of the beautiful wife (“beppin” – there’s even a magazine named after her), and hearing about it on the radio; even hearing of Nakano-Shimbashi being flooded and thinking, christ, that’s where Kazue lives, and she’s in Hakushu probably unaware that she’s seen the last of her apartment – and then wondering if she’d care. Anyway, all of which is to say that I sure hope I am not out of town when the big earthquake hits. No, I don’t mean it morbidly or anything like that, just that, well, forgive me for getting sentimental, it’s just that me and the city mean so much to each other, how could we be apart on such an occasion?
The day my script went “into development” and was never seen again.
I think I want to collect fans. I know some people collect saké cups or ukiyo-e or photographs or whatever, but I now have five fans and I think that I want more. But cool ones, not that sentimental, kitschy sumi-e stuff. I’d also like to get a few dolls; maybe just an Emperor and Empress set. Old, of course. And I’d love to have a Bunraku head. And one good tansu. That’d be enough.
Oh, I lost a pen today. That nice matte black, heavy Ohto pen. Only a thousand yen, but I liked it. But I still have another ’cos I’d ordered two just in case (ah, prophetic me!). Better hightail it to Ad Hoc or Maruzen and order a slew of ’em. Not to be confused with a brace or a gaggle. But possibly a giggle.
What did Bakin say when he was travelling? (No, it’s not a riddle.) Nagoyans “follow Osaka in custom and costume, Kyoto in stinginess, and Edo in literary taste. The women are pretty, but thick-waisted. There is not a single slender woman. I wonder if it’s the climate?” Looks like we got off best.
Bought a penlight today. “Lost a pen, but gained a light.” You tell me what it means.
***
It’s gotten to the point now where when I go into a shoe store before even asking where the large sizes are I first ask if they honestly think they might have anything that would interest me.
***
In the basement there is a train set. A boy of about six years old is playing with it with his friend. The boy wears braces on his weak legs. The friend is Hiro. Occasionally, the boy’s mother comes down and gives the boys sweets and riceballs. And as this is a Saturday, they leave the basement – Hiro holding his friend’s hand as he struggles up the steps – and the three of them drive to Machida in Southern Tokyo to buy extra train parts. Hiro is in the back seat and as he feels the breeze across his face, he looks at his friend’s face and sees that the boy seems to be feeling nothing, his face is a blank. All the while, the mother is talking about nothing and the radio is playing “Walking Blues,” by Son House, “I Shall Not be Moved,” by Charley Patton, and other Blues. When they arrive, there is a tremendously long overpass they must cross in order to reach the department store. Hiro holds on to his friend’s hand, but the walk is so very long, the friend so slow and heavy, he fears what might happen should he let go. Hiro wakes in a sweat. Vaguely he remembers his friend from so long ago; he does not know w
hat ever became of him. “Poor kid, we were friends. Maybe I was his only friend. Me and his train set. Can’t remember his Mother ever saying much. And that music, what was it? Something from very far away. Don’t ever want to hear a voice like that again.” Hiro doesn’t know what to do with his emotion, his very real fear. He feels restless all that day and all of the following day.
Kazuko dreams that her father is reading a letter and frowning slightly. Then he calls her downstairs. This makes her feel very heavy, in a way she can not define, heavy, but not unhappy. A Blues is playing; she likes it somehow, though she’s not even sure she’s ever heard a Blues, the deep stuff. They are in Machida. The letter is in katakana, all borrowed western words. She thinks it’s French, her father German. The more they transcribe it into the alphabet the less it looks like either. Her father had thought it had to do with her studies, a note from one of her professors remarking on a certain recent distraction in her he’d noticed. This was around the time she’d met Kazuo. It was true, she’d been slightly distracted, but never at the expense of her studies, her filial duties, “Oh, no, Father, never!”, she wants to scream but the music’s power takes over and she and her Father all their attention wrapped in it holding hands now the way they did when she was a child and together they look out the windows of the station coffee shop and Machida has vanished, all those shops, schools, the station itself, there is only the Musashi Plain now, Father and Daughter, and a Blues.
***
He needed to speak with her; grabbed her hair and pulled her head back. – “Listen, man.”
***
The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Kazuko ponders, this is Japan, and Edo presents no challenge. I know by now the train and subway systems – why aren’t they joined on maps?, after all they are all of a piece. But they are all either priced so high, or one line is in conflict with another. Why can’t they all be harmonious, provide the same comfort? Just be a normal city, like any other.
***
–What’s a what?
–What’s an anus but a sun spelt backwards? To walk into the sun, a view of Fuji. You and I reamed by light. The mellowest hours. Gotta remember to sort of stick near the Ome Kaido, veer right or the other way, but stick close. At least there’s a bar every thirty minutes or so, “always happy to serve a Western lady.” You could count down the stations, Nakano, Koenji, but what for?
–What for what?
–What’s a station spelt backwards? A long walk. But a good one. No Fuji, but the immediate prospect: the wood fence with torn posters for local politicians; the weeds or should I say the bits of pavement interrupting the growth of vegetation; the dirty stucco, white or pink or turquoise for a season; the opaque windows with their silhouettes of Minnie Mouse or Marilyn Monroe in ’em, or a poster of an “idol,” totally untalented but an idol nonetheless, cock sucked for three months and then a has-been, a wash-out, a distant memory without prospect, or a warrior-robot-weapon, a boy’s idea of cuddliness when Mama’s tits aren’t around, though they usually are. The prospect, immediate: my own visible breath, my feet preceding me, time, all of it in an instant – the prospect of myself, the Marianne I become in Tokyo.
–What?
–What’s Tokyo spelt backwards?
–Wait, you can’t spell kanji. The same thing. East Capitol, Capitol East. Not very glamorous.
–Ah, but that’s why we love ya’, Tokyo, we know who you really are. And you us. Ok, ok, veer, but stick close.
***
The money never mattered. All I wanted was you. Now I walk the streets of strange cities thinking about you.
– Burt Lancaster, The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
***
The ordinary saint. The wife of the recluse. His small hands; eloquent, really.
***
The Cranes of Tokio
Lithe, they stand on one tall, thin leg; in groups, singly, underground, above the city, in the sky itself they stand. (I see one now from my window-screen.) All peace, they stare ahead unmoving, their heads swaying in gorgeous arcs (arc after arc ... ((themselves not arcs but all angles like girls on the verge of womanhood, on the verge of becoming arcs)) ), they begin to describe an arc and then of a sudden swing round and stop again to stare, stare at something or someone that intrigues their gaze for a moment. All gaze. But in their care for us they turn again. White markings, red flashes of light in the evening, and fiery orange bodies, they are in their own way emblems of a sexual paradise (and so many other paradises that we work on together). Androgynes, they reserve a small space for the little-egg-men that would pretend to direct them, but they, we know, are mere adjuncts that would readily could easily scatter like crows with the slightest gesture of a lover’s hand. These cranes are not symbols of longevity, but of a single time, the present, which is to say the future, which is to embrace the past.
(Some years ago an American friend living in Gunma prefecture visited me in Tokyo. As we emerged from Shibuya station I remarked that we were still yet within the station, that the moon the sky the stars were simulations, that yes, thirty-story buildings were contained within the station. “And those cranes?,” she asked. “Building the station ever higher, the city ever wider,” I replied. “In fact, they’re connected to even larger cranes outside this false canopy; those cranes – which we can’t ever see – are less angular, and make very delicate arcs that join the whole city – as far as it extends so far, that is. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them out there on the skirts of the Kanto Plain. After all, Gunma is just the next suburb that’ll be incorporated into the city.” “Uhn, noo, no I hadn’t heard anything at all,” she embarrassedly admitted.)
In ponds and pools and stunted lakes, also called construction sites, their legs stand firmly in the ground – how deep, we do not know. (For that matter, has anyone ever seen them arrive? Just as one day we notice a new building on a previously barren plot, so one morning we notice the cranes in their familiar stance, working, gazing, in the thick of things. ((Nor for that matter, has anyone ever seen them leave.)) ) And their heads – joint, gaze, beak, desire – are in the skies.
The Skies of Tokio
(Why did they stop building the new City Hall? God, how we loved it as the buildings were a-building, growing ever higher, strange towers topped with swaying cranes, red lights flashing, regal cranes all presence making a claim on the future that entails the past as sure as anyone’s grasp, cranes to rival any city or future. And then the towers were finished. Visit them now at night, a Spielbergian light show and no more – hope, desire, imagination: abandoned for a spotlight.)
A male sky over a female city. (Yes, yes they change sexes on occasion, as they choose, but largely remain thus. ((And, as this text is restricted to the skies, so the sexual discussion must be set aside for now.)) ) A gray sky with the occasional white or black rubbings, chalk. A dark gray sky or a light gray sky, with scoops of foam, seed, cream. A black sky – black on black, matte. A steel blue sky with shafts of white. Yesterday, a dark blue sky with flames of orange outlined in gold, and a blood red moon going down. For one week, a brilliant blue sky one wanted to soar into, a death-bliss sky with clouds one felt one could grasp, lift oneself onto, and find angels there to converse with, the two or three wings we desire (the angel’s, the lover’s, the poet’s). Black and white skies, mournful Araki skies. Minimal skies; skies of a severe desire, an austere need (Baudelairian Dandy skies). Skies brooding on evil, Melmothian skies, wandering sorrowful skies. And skies all passionate joy. Skies all excess. Unrivalled skies that no other city possesses imagination enough to love. (Not to make other cities uptight, but just to state a truth. ((And we are, after all, only speaking of love – for the city, for its skies, for its cranes.)) )
The Skies and Cranes of Tokio
Marina Vlady glances East and West; she sees me, smiles. Columbo walks up to me, shakes my hand: “compañero.” They too are cranes of a sort (and so too poor Marion): eyes fixed firmly in the present, which is
to say the future and to incorporate the past, the changing (changeless) city, and so the changing man the changing woman. Deep deep in the earth (concrete, pool, construction site, as you like), high high in the heavens, we build ourselves one another, man and woman, sky and city, we become cranes, firmly joined, canopy to mattress, lover to lover, we gaze, sway, shudder, and move on, recreating ourselves lovers cities.
***
Nadar from his balloon sites Tokyo.
***
Lang says it used to be a canal city. You can see the signs everywhere in the traditional parts of the city. Even Jimbocho, Ginza. But what does that mean? What is a “traditional part” of the city? One that is up to date and without a hint of its past. That’s the only possible answer. So what do we mean? The old part? No, all parts being equal. The low city? Presumably. But did their old houses match ours? Were they anything like ours in scale and beauty? No, completely different histories, cultures. Low city opposed to a soaring city. Amsterdam has its canals. And yet, why did they remain in contact only with us for two hundred years? What attracted them to this species of foreigner? Even still. Isabel toiling on that dictionary. A German guy applied for a job with Amro and was sure he’d get it, had some Dutch, figuring he’d pick it up fast enough – and then they had to turn him down because three Japanese applied and they all spoke Dutch! Why did they? Who but the Dutch should ever speak it? Ever be able to? Eight consonants in a row. Curious history between us. “Dutch learning.” And what’s caught on? No two nations more unlike. Perhaps an unspoken longing between we two cities. Something hidden, unable to be articulated. A need to be spoken, a desire to be acknowledged. Two tongues to be desired. Ah, give me the sound of bicycles and everyone of all sizes and ages and sexes, all out at night, a white beer, a red beer, a blue beer. Young girls, cozy, and never lose sight of the edge. Amsterdam, home.
***
“Timeless. Temporary. Tokyo.”
– Kazuo